Flight from the Phoenix Nest
by Georgina B
Summary: AU in which a little upgrade to Ozai and Azula's relationship means a big change in the outcome of Sozin's Comet. Twenty years later, a sheltered firebender princess risks everything to protect a ray of light in a dark world.
1. Wings of Flame

Fair warning: this is a dark story. An M rating seemed excessive since there's no explicit sex, graphic violence, or even vulgar language, but there are some heavy themes here – namely incest-as-abuse (as opposed to incest-as-smokin'-hot, which I think is an important clarification; the characters upon whom it's perpetrated don't always see it that way, but it _is_ abuse) and the murder of children, not to mention that it all takes place in an apocalyptic Bad End AU in which a good chunk of the main characters are dead. If that's not your thing, I totally understand, but please just…don't read it. I've dealt with reviewers repeatedly insulting my work because they disagree with its basic premise, and it's fruitless for everyone involved.

Oh, and be advised that this story is NCC: non-comics-compliant. I haven't gotten around to reading the ATLA comics, and from what I've heard they're not my cup of tea. Since this AU diverges from canon before the point where they picked up, that shouldn't be too much of a problem, but there may be elements of backstory or characterization that are different from what's presented in the comics. 

**Chapter One: Wings of Flame**

"Sorry I'm late, Father. Good palanquin bearers are so hard to come by these days. So, is everything ready for our departure?"

Father glanced over his shoulder. "Rise, Azula," he said, turning back toward the sea and the ship waiting for them. "Royalty does not greet the dawning of a new world on its knees."

Hearing Father announce his new title to the assembly in the plaza, watching the banners unfurl and the pillars blaze, Azula almost trembled with excitement. She could feel Sozin's Comet approaching, tantalizing her with its promise of untold power, and with it a glorious new era.

As Phoenix King, Father would need a queen by his side. Mother, while she was around, had held him back; a Phoenix Queen would have to be someone Father could trust with the future of his empire. Someone who would bear him children strong of body and sharp of wit, that wouldn't disappoint him like Zuko had. Someone who would be a capable ruler, but defer to the wisdom of his judgment – a consummate second in command.

It was her hand he would ask, she was certain of it. It wasn't as if she hadn't brought it up to him before. _I'm not a courtesan, you know,_ she had said a few nights ago, her white legs unfolding on his red bedclothes. Her tone had been teasing, but her meaning, she trusted, was clear.

Time passed on swift wings once they left the plaza, and it seemed only moments before Azula stood on the walkway of an airship, the loose locks of her hair whipping in the wind. The fleet hadn't even reached land when she noticed one of the other airships falling out of formation. She leapt from her walkway and jetted over to it, arriving just in time to thwart a pathetic attempt at sabotage by some of the Avatar's band.

Between Azula and the firebenders in the crew, the Water Tribe boy, the escaped prisoner and the blind earthbender never stood a chance. They didn't go down without a fight, but they went down, for good.

Once the detoured airship had rejoined the fleet, Azula surveyed the inferno that had been the Wulong Forest. She realized, looking ahead, that Father's airship was no longer leading the charge. After casting about for a moment, she saw it downed and streaming smoke amid a field of tall stone pillars, and nearby, the fireworks of a bending battle.

A twinge of intuition made her take off toward them. Approaching the scene, she saw Father and the Avatar locked in combat, and was at first delighted; how truly propitious was this day, on which their most elusive quarry had offered himself up for slaughter. Then, with a plummeting feeling, she understood that Father wasn't winning. He wasn't even holding his own. The Avatar was unleashing his arsenal, his eyes and arrows aglow, and Father was _fleeing._

The future Azula had imagined for herself flashed before her eyes like the life of a dying soldier: her place at Father's side, her magnificent reign, the generations of phoenix royalty she would beget. She would _not_ let some sanctimonious little monk take it from her.

She ducked behind a pillar to await the perfect instant, knowing she'd have to strike true or fight. The Avatar slammed Father down onto a pillar and hovered above him, his sphere of elements spinning full tilt. When he flung up his arms to deliver the final blow. Azula tapped into the energy around her, swung her arm in an arc, and dealt a blow of her own: a massive bolt of comet-powered lightning, penetrating the sphere, connecting with the Avatar.

The sphere disintegrated as he plunged through the air. No sooner had he smashed to the ground between the pillars than Azula was with Father, helping him to his feet. He seemed stunned, breathing heavily, but after a few moments he shook Azula off and strode to the edge of the pillar.

"We've done it," he said, staring down at the Avatar's battered body. "At last. We've done it."

 _We?_ Azula thought, but said nothing. The muscles in Father's bare back flexed as he took a revitalizing breath. "Now that I have eliminated the Avatar, there will be nothing to stand in the way of the Great Purification. And nothing," he added, turning to face Azula, "to stand in the way of our rule."

Hearing _our,_ Azula forgot _I._ "Father…?"

Father didn't smile often, so when he did, it was as if there were jewels between his teeth. He bestowed that honor upon Azula now. "Azula, I have been most fortunate to have you as a daughter, an officer, and a...companion." He took her hands and squeezed them gently. "I would be even more fortunate to have you as a queen."

They were wed not long after the Great Purification, in a ceremony that was also Azula's coronation as Phoenix Queen, and the last held in the old palace before it was demolished to begin construction on a bigger, better one. Everyone of consequence in the former Fire Nation was in attendance, watching from their knees as their new queen made her vows to her husband and her empire.

For the occasion, Azula had commissioned a special accessory: a series of elegantly-crafted bronze-and-gold pipes, worn over her gown on her back. They were sized and arranged such that when she focused fire through them, it emerged in sapphire plumes that resembled wings. Wearing them, standing beside Father, hearing the officiant proclaim them bound forever, she felt weightless – as if, on wings of flame, she could fly.


	2. The Royal Children

**Chapter Two: The Royal Children**

A wall of earth rose sharply in front of Yuzhen mid-stride, forcing a split-second tactical decision: bank to avoid it, or use it to her advantage? Choosing the latter, she ducked around to the other side and let the stone absorb Lily's blows. She popped out the blades embedded in her vambraces, used them to grip the rock as she scaled the wall, and from atop it, flung fire down at Lily.

Lily deftly dodged the assault and, pushing off from a stone spike erupting from the arena's floor, leapt onto the wall across from Yuzhen. Legs and arms arranged in a perfect dueling posture, a close-lipped grin on her face, she advanced on her elder sister.

As suddenly as it had appeared, the wall slammed back into the floor, leaving both opponents dazed and scrambling to regain their bearings. Yuzhen took off first, weaving through the litter of earthen obstacles in the arena, buying time while her mind worked furiously to come up with a strategy. Before it was fully formulated, the ground was rumbling beneath her, her surroundings falling away as she soared toward the ceiling on a column of rock.

An army of similar columns sprang up all around Yuzhen, Lily perched on one. The match became dancelike, plumes of red-gold fire flying like silken scarves. The opponents bounded between stone towers, some crumbling behind them, others materializing before them. Locks of hair escaped from topknots; licks of flame issued from mouths and nostrils.

Standing still for a moment atop a column, Yuzhen caught her breath and scanned the others for her sister. The back of her neck prickled with alarm when she realized Lily was nowhere to be seen. Just then, a sweeping kick from behind knocked her off her feet and off of the column; she hit the ground so hard she blacked out. Her vision returned a few seconds later to the sight of Lily straddling her, brandishing her fire-daggers, waiting for Lanfen to call the match.

Yuzhen gritted her teeth and summoned a final surge of energy. Rearing up just enough to grab Lily around the waist, she hooked her right-side limbs through her sister's, thrusted her hips forward and rolled Lily over onto her back, pinning her with a fire-dagger of her own at her throat. Three breathless seconds passed.

"Match!" shouted Lanfen from the spectators' balcony. "Princess Yuzhen is the victor."

Yuzhen's dagger snapped into smoke. From the balcony, she heard Zhian and Anzu cheering and whooping, and tried not to grin too broadly as she let Lily up. "That was close," she said, dusting off her practice armor.

Lily sniffed. "Indeed."

As Lily stalked off toward the steps to the balcony, the obstacles in the arena collapsed and disappeared into the stone floor, even the rubble clearing with a gesture from Jiyi. She was an earthbender in the employ of the king and queen, her main duty to assist in the prince and princesses' training – to keep things in the arena 'interesting', so they would learn to strategize on their feet instead of memorizing a course.

Yuzhen climbed the steps behind Lily and wrote her name on Lanfen's record scroll, accepting the firebending instructor's congratulations with a smile and nod. Once she'd shed the bulkiest components of her practice armor, she headed through the archway into the corridor, motioning for her brother and youngest sister to follow.

"Come on," she said, "I'm starving."

"Shouldn't we change for dinner?" Zhian asked as he and Anzu hurried to Yuzhen's side.

"I don't think the roast turtleduck will mind."

The hallways of the palace were high-ceilinged, their walls adorned by stern-looking sconces and portraits of equally stern-looking family members, populated by servants in cloaks and veils that blended in with the décor. That night, they rang with the sounds of the royal children's laughter as they raced each other to the dining room. When at last they tumbled through the entryway, Yuzhen persuaded the serving staff to bring out the soup early, though Mother usually had them under strict orders not to serve anything until everyone was seated.

Yuzhen, Zhian and Anzu had nearly polished off their soup when Lily appeared in the entryway, bathed, groomed and dressed to the specifications Mother laid out when they dined with her. She cast a disapproving gaze over her siblings as she took her seat.

"You three are as civilized as hogmonkeys," she said. "Mother would have you eating plain jook for a week for such disrespect."

"Mother's not here, Lily," Yuzhen said.

"She will be to-mor-row," Lily singsonged smugly as she brought her soup spoon to her lips. "And so will Father."

The atmosphere in the room seemed to contract, to tighten at the mention of Father, at the reminder that the next night was the night he'd be joining them for dinner. Mother dined with the children just about every night when she was home, but Father attended only once each month, and his presence made the meal even more a ceremony – even more a test – than it ordinarily was.

Anzu turned to look at Yuzhen, her golden eyes wide. "Are we going to get in trouble with Father?" she asked anxiously.

Yuzhen glared at Lily. "No, Anzu. Lily was just teasing."

Two servants came in to collect the soup dishes and begin serving the roast, but Lily snapped, "Since you're apparently unable to conduct yourselves properly without direction, I'll spell it out: you do not clear a course until _everyone_ has finished with it. I am still eating my soup. The others can wait."

The rest of dinner was spent in silence, save the formal goodnights said before leaving the dining room. Once Lily was gone, the risk of her scorn past, Yuzhen lifted Anzu onto her hip and carried her youngest sister with her to the baths.

Though Anzu couldn't spar, since her firebending hadn't come in yet and her siblings were all much too old to make it any semblance of a fair fight, Anzu still wore her own set of miniature practice armor. Yuzhen helped her unlace and remove it while the golden dragons' heads mounted on the walls disgorged hot water into the bath, with a roar that made it sound as if they were real dragons.

Shooing the servant hovering solicitiously by the doors, Yuzhen stepped into the bath with Anzu, and filled a bucket with water from one of the dragon fountains. "Ready?" she said, then dumped the bucket over Anzu's head, slicking her long dark hair so that it clung to her head and shoulders.

"Now," Yuzhen continued as she massaged shampoo into Anzu's hair, "at dinner tomorrow, if Father asks you what you're learning from Liling in History, what do you say?"

"The Great March of Civilization," Anzu answered promptly.

"Which Firelord?"

"Azulon."

"Good. And in Literature?"

"The Ballad of the Noble Solider–-no–-Warrior."

"Good." Yuzhen filled the bucket again and rinsed the shampoo out of Anzu's hair. "Geography?"

"The Great Cities of the East."

Yuzhen began combing Anzu's hair, working jade teeth gently through its tangles. "And what do you say if Father asks how your training with Lanfen is going?"

This time, Anzu hesitated before responding. "I've memorized six drill forms," she said, "and I can lap the arena in a minute."

"Excellent." Looking over her sister's shoulder, Yuzhen saw her face reflected in the water – her brow bunched, her mouth downturned. "Give it time, Anzu," she said softly. "You're only five."

"Lily says _she_ could firebend before she could walk."

"Don't worry about what Lily says." Yuzhen bent to kiss Anzu on the wet crown of her head. "You'll do beautifully tomorrow. Mother and Father will be pleased."

Not that Mother and Father ever seemed pleased with much of anything, except themselves and perhaps Lily. Not that Yuzhen didn't worry herself, thinking back to her own earliest awareness of the fire inside. It _had_ come far sooner than five, for her and for Lily and Zhian, too–-but what use was fretting? Anzu was a late bloomer, Yuzhen told herself time and again, for she was loath to consider what Mother and Father might do if she never bloomed at all.

After bathing, Yuzhen let Anzu come to bed with her, knowing this was the last night such a thing would be possible; Lily and Mother both scorned Yuzhen's indulgence of her youngest sister, but of the two of them only Mother could forbid it. A servant glided through the corridor extinguishing the sconces and together the princesses lay in velvet darkness, their lengthening breaths lulling one another to sleep.


	3. Dinner with Father

**Chapter Three: Dinner With Father**

The palace of the Phoenix King and Queen was itself like royalty, enthroned on a stone pedestal above a yawning pit of lava. Located in what had been the Fire Nation before all nations were absorbed into the Great Empire, the palace was the capital, the beacon, the heart of the entire world, and life for the royal children began and ended there. Yuzhen had seen what her home looked like from the outside only in pictures.

She watched from her bedroom window as Mother and Father docked their airship and jetted over the lava. There was no permanent pathway between the palace and the surrounding land. Mother and Father, who came and went most frequently, used firebending to propel themselves across the pit, and Jiyi raised temporary bridges for dignitaries and deliveries. It was the perfect safeguard against invasion – and escape.

Mother and Father processed inside, and Yuzhen moved away from the window. The servant who had dressed her in her formal robes did her makeup and fixed her hair, as was custom before any occasion on which she would see her parents. The final piece of the ensemble was her golden hairpin, shaped like the insignia of the Great Empire.

In the dining room she sat, as usual, next to Anzu; Lily and Zhian sat on the other side of the table, and Mother and Father would occupy either end. Servants came through lighting candles and setting places. No one said a word.

Mother and Father didn't come to dinner in their full royal regalia, but they did enter the dining room as they would a room of their subjects. Even pregnant, Mother maintained her regal bearing, though that wasn't so surprising a feat for someone who had been pregnant as many times as Mother had. Yuzhen supposed she was well used to it by now.

Mother and Father sat, and the servants distributed soup and wine. Yuzhen glanced at Anzu with a finger to her lips, reminding her not to speak until spoken to.

"Welcome home, Father," Lily said sweetly. "Welcome home, Mother. I trust your journey went well?"

"Yes, thank you, Lily," Father said.

Had any of her siblings spoken up in greeting, they'd as likely be scolded for their forwardness as praised for their politeness. But Lily was their parents' favorite. Lily was the most poised, the most shrewd, the most loyal. Lily was the loveliest, at least by Mother and Father's standards – she had always looked very much like Mother.

She was even named after Mother, though of course she didn't go by Azula. When she was small, Father had called her _little fire lily,_ and the nickname stuck.

Father spoke awhile of the places he and Mother had been over the past week and the things they had done there. Lily listened attentively, nodding and smiling. Mother lifted her cup and took a long drink of wine.

"No trouble in our absence, I presume?" Father said.

"Oh, no. Liling turned in her evaluations of our oral exams in History today." Lily's gaze flicked downward in a calculated charade of modesty. "It would be unseemly to brag," she said, "but I was pleased."

"Splendid," Mother murmured into the rim of her cup.

Now and again Yuzhen wondered if perhaps Lily wasn't Mother's favorite, only Father's. Now and again she detected a certain insincerity in Mother's praise of her second daughter, a certain distrustful narrowing of Mother's eyes when she looked at her. But surely Yuzhen was imagining it. Lily was so much like Mother – why wouldn't Mother favor her?

"I hope the rest of you can say the same," Mother added. "Yuzhen?"

"Yes, Mother," Yuzhen said with none of Lily's affectation. "A perfect score."

"Zhian?"

"Near-perfect. Every question correct except for one."

"Which one?" Mother demanded.

Yuzhen's younger brother glanced up at Mother, then back down at his soup, tapping his spoon nervously against the dish. "Um–-how many days was the siege of Ba Sing Se?"

Mother's fingers curled around her cup again, but she didn't pick it up. "And how many days was it, Zhian?" she said.

Zhian gulped. "Six hundred."

"And you'll write that six hundred times each day for the next...oh, shall we say six hundred days?" Mother's lips, red as the wine in her cup, crooked in a half-smile. "I'll make sure Liling provides you with plenty of paper."

The dinner conversation continued along those lines, from the soup straight through the poached fish and pickled vegetables. Each of the royal children was questioned extensively on their schooling and training, and commended or castigated accordingly. It was exhausting, but, Yuzhen thought, most things about life as a prince or princess of the Great Empire were. It was like being a soldier in a war in which there was no winning, only surviving – if you were lucky.

Mother and Father were satisfied with Anzu's progress in her schooling. When they asked after her training, Anzu hopefully trotted out the answer she had practiced with Yuzhen the night before. "Fine," Father said, apparently unimpressed. "What about sparring?"

Anzu looked panicked. "Forgive me for speaking out of turn, Father," Yuzhen said, "but Anzu is so much younger than the rest of us––she has no one to spar with."

"If you'll recall," Lily said snidely, "I could hold my own in the arena with you when I was her age."

"If _you'll_ recall," Yuzhen snapped, "Zhian's seven years older than Anzu, not four, or aren't you doing as well in Mathematics as you are in History?"

"Enough!" Father's voice was thunderous, his eyes blazing. Both Yuzhen and Lily shut their mouths and stared at their laps. After several moments, Father spoke again. "If you have no suitable sparring partner, Anzu, we will bring one to you. Surely there's a young firebender of appropriate rank within reasonable distance of the palace."

"Thank you, Father," Anzu said, almost whispering. Lily wouldn't dare make another unsolicited interjection, but Yuzhen could sense the words perched on Mother's tongue, the question in her arched eyebrow: would Anzu speak them first? "But I can't firebend yet."

Usually when Father addressed his children, he did so without really looking at them, as if they weren't important enough to merit his full attention; only Lily was a regular recipient of that honor. Now, his head jerked sharply in Anzu's direction. "What?"

Anzu's face was whiter than the camelephant-ivory plate in front of her, but she didn't stammer or babble. "I can't firebend yet. I'm sorry."

Yuzhen's instinct was to grab her youngest sister and throw her arms around her, to crouch and brace as if in anticipation of the fallout from a bomb. She didn't know what to expect from Father – a shouting rage, a cruel punishment, an impossible demand? – but she knew it would be horrible. Anyone with the scantest education in history knew that Father was not merciful to children who disappointed him.

"I see," Father said coolly. He lifted his gaze from Anzu to regard the table at large with his usual indifference. "We're finished here. Children, you are dismissed."

Father's non-response to Anzu's admission rattled Yuzhen, perhaps more than any real reaction he might have had. Along with her siblings, she rose from her seat, bade her parents goodnight, and filed out of the dining room, but instead of going to her bedroom, she hung back.

She hugged the wall outside the dining room's entryway and breathed as softly as she could. What Father had said about Anzu's firebending, or lack thereof, in her presence wasn't the last thing he would say on the matter, Yuzhen was certain. And if she was to have any chance of protecting her youngest sister, she had to know what was in store for her.

"Azula," Father said, "how old is Anzu?"

"Five years old, Father," Mother replied.

"Too old." Yuzhen heard the clinking sounds of servants gathering the plates and cups. "I have been remiss in addressing this problem."

"As have I." Mother sighed. "I confess I had hoped the issue might resolve itself with patience. But it seems the time for patience is past."

"You know as well as I that we cannot drag about dead weight the way we once did. Those who are not fit to be Princes and Princesses of the Great Empire shall not be allowed the privilege."

"I couldn't agree with you more, Father. I will take care of it."

A cold hand clutched at Yuzhen's heart. They couldn't mean what it seemed they meant, she wouldn't believe it–-and yet she had heard those words before. _Those who are not fit to be Princes and Princesses of the Great Empire shall not be allowed the privilege._

Yuzhen ducked around the nearest corner and waited for Mother and Father to leave the dining room, watched from the shadows as Mother went to the library, where she often retired after dinner. A few minutes later, Yuzhen followed her, her fear of confronting Mother overpowered by her fear of what would happen to Anzu if she didn't.

She would talk to Mother, reason with her. Never mind that Mother was hardly the first person Yuzhen thought of when she thought of the word 'reasonable.' Never mind that she had absolutely no recourse if she failed. She had to try.


	4. Replaceable

**Chapter Four: Replaceable**

In the library, Mother sat in a high-backed chair, a book open on her lap, or what remained of it. Her belly was a round hillock beneath her gown, foretelling a fast-approaching delivery. Yuzhen had come to regard Mother's pregnancies not with the awe and joy typically associated with burgeoning life, but as trials to undergo. They made Mother especially irritable, and the birth of a new child was no guarantee it would appear in the next family portrait.

"Mother?" Yuzhen nudged the library doors shut behind her. "I need to speak with you."

Mother glanced up from her reading. "Did you knock?" she asked, frowning.

"I––"

"It is exceedingly rude, Yuzhen, to intrude upon a person's privacy without knocking."

"I'm sorry, Mother. But please..." Yuzhen went to Mother's side and knelt on a cushioned stool next to her chair. "I overheard you and Father talking in the dining room. You must reconsider."

Mother's expression didn't change at Yuzhen's plea. On a jade tray on the end table beside her chair, there lay a long pipe of bamboo and gold. Mother picked it up, lit it with a fingertip, and slid it between her lips. She had become fond, in recent years, of the leaf of a certain flower that grew in the former Earth Kingdom, which when burnt produced an odorous purple smoke.

Yuzhen strove for patience as Mother took a long drag, then slotted her pipe into the notch between her middle and index finger. "So you've come to beg for your sister's life," she said, looking down at her eldest daughter with bored contempt. "How precious."

"How can you be sure Anzu's not a firebender?" Yuzhen began. "Couldn't you wait a few more years?"

"You mean continue to water a worthless plant in the hopes that it will eventually bear fruit? We are as sure as need be. Father has a sense for these things."

"Being a non-bender doesn't make you _worthless._ Anzu is smart and strong. She respects you and Father. She––"

"Yuzhen, this is not about Anzu's redeeming qualities. It's about _pride_." Mother's gaze shifted to the huge world map that hung on the wall between bookshelves, on which New Era cities were indicated by the golden insignia of the Great Empire.

"With the Great Purification," she continued, "we impressed upon the world the supremacy of our element. In the New Era, firebenders are the dominant people. We are the ones repopulating the earth. How would it look to the subjects of the Great Empire if one of the first princesses of the New Era couldn't firebend?"

"How would they _know_?" Yuzhen said. "Mother, we've never left the palace. Your subjects know us only from portraits. The only thing we use our firebending for is training, and we don't even know what we're training _for_."

Mother sniffed. "When I was younger than you are, I was one of the most important military and political figures in the Fire Nation. By the time I was your age, I was a wife, a mother, and Phoenix Queen of the Great Empire. You have the luxury of spending your time doing nothing but studying and training, and you complain about it?" She shook her head. "Spoiled brat."

Biting back the retorts she could have made, Yuzhen stood and paced the library. The tall bookshelves stared down at her like the eyes of her ancestors in the portraits that lined the hallways. On many occasions, she'd taken these books in her hands, felt their intimidating weight, drawn her finger along the titles on their spines. They all told of the glory of the Great Empire, or of the Fire Nation in days past.

"You could send Anzu away," she said quietly. "Let some other family raise her, give her a new name and identity. She wouldn't be a princess, but...she wouldn't have to die."

Mother laughed. "Such a sense of humor you have, Yuzhen. A child of royal blood being brought up by commoners!"

Losing her composure was the last thing Yuzhen wanted to do – it would get her nowhere with Mother, even more surely than trying to reason with her had been – but she couldn't help it. She thought of Anzu being given drugged tea, of her limp body being carried outside, of the seething lava casting an orange glow over her sleeping face, and tears pricked her eyes.

"There _must be a way_." Yuzhen's voice felt as if it were squeezing out around a stone in her throat. "Mother, _please._ When you––after Zuwei died, I promised myself I would never let it happen again."

Purple smoke curled out of Mother's mouth, its corners twitching in amusement at Yuzhen's dismay. "Then let this be a lesson to you not to make promises you can't keep." She inclined her head in the direction of her belly. "Cheer up. Soon you'll have a new sibling upon whom to squander your affections, and you'll forget all about Anzu."

Had she not known it for an act of high treason, punishable by death, Yuzhen would have slapped her mother across the face. "She's not _replaceable_!"

Mother's smile evaporated. "Everyone is replaceable, Yuzhen," she said, her eyes flashing like daggers. " _Everyone_."

Yuzhen swallowed hard. She would not cry in front of Mother, she told herself, she _would not._ She would not run from Mother, either, but before her eyes could betray her, she turned and walked quickly through the library doors.


	5. The Servant's Secret

**Chapter Five: The Servant's Secret**

Yuzhen burst into her brother's bedroom pink-cheeked and gasping, half from crying, half from having run straight from the library to the wing of the palace she and her siblings shared. "Yuzhen?" Zhian said, startled. "What's wrong?"

He set down the book he had been reading in bed, and Yuzhen came to climb up beside him. From the time Zhian could walk, he and Yuzhen had been close, united against the manipulations of their middle sister. He didn't see through their parents the way Yuzhen did, but for that she forgave him. He didn't know what she knew. She had kept it from him – spared him.

Until now. "They're going to kill her, Zhian," Yuzhen choked out. "Mother and Father, they're going to kill Anzu because she's not a firebender."

Zhian's eyes widened. "No. They wouldn't, you––you must have misunderstood."

"I didn't _misunderstand_! Mother told me herself!"

Shadows of confusion and consternation darkened Zhian's face, and Yuzhen briefly regretted coming to him with this. With Lily as good as a third parent and Anzu so young, they each had only the other with whom to share their secrets and worries, but Yuzhen often forgot the six years between her and her brother. At twelve years old, he was still a child; he couldn't shoulder this burden any more easily than she.

"I have to get her out," Yuzhen said. She said it without thinking, without really knowing what she was saying, but as soon as the words left her mouth, they seemed carved in stone. "I have to run away, and take her with me."

Zhian looked horrified. "Yuzhen, _no_."

"There's no other choice."

"How would you get out? Where would you _go_? The Great Empire is the whole world, and Mother and Father _are_ the Great Empire. There's nowhere you can hide where they can't find you."

Yuzhen shook her head. "There must be somewhere," she said. The exhiliration of her decision electrified her body, making her heart hammer and her hands shake. "There _was_ a resistance in the New Era, however small. We learned about it in History, remember? There were some who still fought after Father slew the Avatar, like our elder brother. Maybe a few of those rebels are still active. Underground."

Zhian's voice rose and cracked. "The resistance is dead, everyone knows it. You can't leave, Yu––"

At the sound of tapping on his bedroom doors, Zhian fell silent mid-protest, and he and Yuzhen exchanged panicked glances. Had they spoken too loudly? Had Lily heard them from her bedroom across the hall, and come to drag her traitorous sister to their parents?

"Come in," Zhian said, for if it was Lily, angering her with impoliteness would do them no good.

To their shared surprise, it wasn't Lily who entered, but a servant. "Forgive the interruption," she said, "but I overheard you talking, and I––"

"Whatever you heard, you heard wrong," Zhian cut her off, his face flushed with fear. "Leave us."

"You misunderstand." The servant approached them. "I can help."

For as long as Yuzhen had lived, all of the palace staff had been women. To protect his wife and daughters, Father said; _to better possess us_ , Yuzhen thought. But the servants hadn't always been cloaked and veiled. Yuzhen remembered the face of her beloved nursemaid, Song, well.

She remembered, too, when things had changed, though she had been very young. In a fit of jealousy, Mother had accused the servants of trying to seduce her husband, to betray their queen. She had insisted that the servants' uniform become a shapeless cloak and face-obscuring veil, with only a window of fine netting through which to see.

Now they were interchangeable, practically invisible, with no identities by which they were known or names by which they were called. It had been that way for so long that Yuzhen hadn't stopped to consider that one of them might know something other than how to polish her jewelry. "What?" she said, breathless.

"The rebels' last stand was in the former Northern Water Tribe," the servant replied. "If any of them still live, that's where you'll find them." She reached into the folds of her cloak and withdrew a silver ring with an amber stone, which seemed almost to glow as from some inscrutable inner light. "Take this. So they'll know you mean them no harm."

Yuzhen took the ring and secreted it quickly in her sash. "But how will I escape?"

"The king and queen will leave the palace again in two days. That night, a cart will come to deliver food. With stealth and good timing, you and Anzu can sneak onto it and slip away, and your parents' travels will give you a head start." The servant covered Yuzhen's hand with her own, its pale-blue veins and bony fingers telling of a woman a good deal older than Mother – perhaps Father's age. "But they _will_ pursue you when they return, and they do not give up easily. Are you prepared for that?"

"I know. And I am."

"Yuzhen, you've lost your mind!" Zhian cried, looking on the verge of tears. "All that's going to happen if you do this is you and Anzu will _both_ be killed."

The servant's gaze was sympathetic. Yuzhen turned from her to Zhian, placing her hands on his shoulders, looking into his eyes. "Zhian, Anzu trusts me to keep her safe. I'd rather die than live knowing I'd betrayed that trust."

Zhian would never know how desperately Yuzhen wished she could take him away, too. Losing him – her childhood playmate and confidante, the best friend she'd ever had – was a price steeper than death. But even if not for the untenable unwieldiness of three people instead of two, or her hesitance to risk a life that wasn't in imminent danger, it couldn't have been. He wouldn't have come.

He wasn't mean-spirited like Lily, but he believed in the Great Empire. Being its prince still meant something to him. He would rather spend the next six hundred days writing _the siege of Ba Sing Se was six hundred days_ six hundred times, hoping that this, finally, would make Mother happy and Father proud, than step off the edge of the only world he'd ever known.

"I need to ask you a favor." Yuzhen brushed a loose strand of her brother's hair away from his crumpled face, the backs of her fingers caressing his cheek. "Don't tell Mother and Father we spoke of this. They'll find out Anzu and I are gone soon enough, but if they don't know where we've gone, it'll buy us some time."

Zhian stared at her. For a terrible moment, Yuzhen thought he might refuse. "Okay," he muttered, and she wrapped him in her arms and hugged him fiercely, murmuring _thank you_ and _I'm sorry._

With the gentle rustle of fabric, the servant moved toward the doors. Yuzhen rose to catch her before she left, asking, "Why are you helping me? How is it your ring will make the rebels trust me?" To think, at least one agent of the resistance had been under her nose all the time, preparing her meals and laundering her clothing. "Who _are_ you?"

Wistfulness passed like a cloud through the servant's eyes. "The less you know, the safer we both shall be," she said. "Good luck, Princess."


	6. Journey to the Magnificent City

**Chapter Six: Journey to the Magnificent City**

The next two days seemed to pass at fluctuating speeds – slow when Yuzhen lay awake at night, listening for the sound of Mother's footfalls heading for Anzu's room, and fast when a servant struck the dawn bells, reminding her how few mornings she had left before she made her first move in the most dangerous game she'd ever play.

She said nothing to Anzu until the time came. Until, having packed the warmest clothing she owned in the most suitable bag she could find, having watched from her window as Mother and Father's airship vanished amid moon-silvered clouds, having waited until the corridors were dark and the palace slept, she crept out of her bedroom and into her youngest sister's, waking her with a whisper in her ear.

"Anzu." Yuzhen lit the lantern on the bedside table. "Anzu, wake up. It's me."

Anzu's small body stirred beneath the bedclothes, her fist rising to rub an eye. "Yuzhen?" Her face in the lanternlight was sleep-fogged, bewildered. "It's still night."

Yuzhen took a deep breath. "Anzu, listen to me. Some scary stuff is about to happen, and I can't tell you why now, but I need you to do two really important things for me, okay?" Anzu nodded, wide-eyed. "Keep quiet, and do everything I tell you. No matter what."

Anzu nodded again, and Yuzhen took her face in her hands and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Everything's going to be all right. I promise."

Yuzhen helped Anzu get dressed and packed, then hoisted her onto her hip, knowing they would steal through the palace more quickly if she didn't have to wait for Anzu's shorter strides. They headed for the lowest story, where food was stored in thick-walled rooms lined with ice and straw. There, too, was the entrance where deliveries were made, outside of which they'd find the cart that would carry them away.

Yuzhen snuck through the doors – across the few feet of open stone terrace between the palace and the cart, catching a glimpse of the lava, feeling its hot breath on her face – while the deliverymen were hauling in the last few barrels. By the time they returned to shut and latch the back doors of the cart, she and Anzu were inside, tucked behind two wooden cartons stacked on top of each other.

The stone beneath the cart's wheels rumbled as Jiyi bade it form a bridge across the pit. Then came the snorts of the ostrich-horses hitched to the cart, the thump of their footfalls and the clack of the wheels on the bridge. All the while, Yuzhen held her breath, scarcely able to believe that they were simply riding over the vermilion maw of the beast that had guarded the palace all her life. Beside her, Anzu trembled.

Once they had rattled down the sloping border of the pit, starting down the road that snaked away from the palace, Yuzhen relaxed a little. She pulled Anzu closer to her and stroked her hair. The servant's amber ring, threaded through a silver chain and hung around Yuzhen's neck, rested like a promising hand on her heart.

After awhile, Anzu's breathing grew slow and deep, and Yuzhen figured she had fallen asleep. She allowed herself no such luxury. Having studied the maps in the library before they left, she knew they would need to reach a seaport to obtain passage to The Magnificent City – the former Northern Water Tribe, now named as all New Era cities were named, with an exultant adjective that seemed designed to convince the rest of the world that the Great Empire was, in fact, great. What she didn't know was when or how that would happen.

So she stayed alert, ready to act as soon as action was necessary. When, many hours later, the deliverymen parked and left the cart, Yuzhen didn't wait to find out if or when they'd return. She gathered Anzu and their belongings and together they boarded another cart, this one with cargo marked for overseas transport. Not until they were safely stowed did she realize that, for the first time, her feet had just touched ground outside the palace.

The seaport was the first city she had seen outside of drawings, and the sheer volume of humanity there overwhelmed her. She'd never been around so many people, heard so many voices, inhaled so many smells. She and Anzu both wore cloaks with hoods that cast their faces in shadow, but still Yuzhen passed through the crowds in constant fear of being recognized. Perhaps it was only natural to feel noticeable, she thought bitterly, when one was raised to regard herself and her family as the center of the universe.

They found a ship bound for The Magnificent City and a spot in the hold to hide, and there, for a few hours, Yuzhen did sleep. She woke with no sense of what time it was, and too keen a sense of the ship's motion over water. To distract herself from her seasickness, she thought about The Magnificent City, about seeking and meeting the rebels there.

Yuzhen had never really met anyone – only visiting dignitaries, to whom she was not allowed to speak directly, when they joined her family for dinner, and new siblings, who were, of course, babies. Just getting accustomed to unfamiliar faces would be strange for her and Anzu. She supposed she would have felt nervous about it, if she hadn't had so much else to feel nervous about.

It seemed like a very long time before Yuzhen felt the ship come to a stop and heard the sounds of passengers disembarking on the deck above, but she didn't know how long. When she and Anzu slipped out onto the dock, wearing their cloaks and the heavy clothing they'd packed, they saw that it was day. How many had passed since their escape from the palace, Yuzhen couldn't guess.

The Magnificent City was an incongruous sprawl, buildings and watchtowers flying the flag of the Great Empire surrounded by smoke-blackened snow and ice. First-class citizens, soldiers and civilians who had been Fire Nationals in the Old Era, roamed the packed-mud streets dressed in red. Water Tribe natives, dressed in blue, moved aside to let them pass.

"Yuzhen," Anzu spoke up, for the first time since they'd left her bedroom, "I'm hungry."

Yuzhen hadn't let herself acknowledge it, but she too heard the bereft wail of her stomach. "Me too. Let's find some food."

She wove through the city carrying Anzu, searching for someplace small, out of the way, with a largely native patronage; the further they stayed from soldiers, she figured, the better. Soon she was shouldering through the tattered curtain in the doorway of just such a place. Inside, her mouth watered at the sight and scent of skewered meat and steaming dumplings at the tables around her.

"We need food," she blurted out to the man behind the counter – the first words she'd ever spoken to someone not family or palace staff, and they were blunt and fumbled.

The man, a grey-bearded native, snorted. "I need money."

Yuzhen set her bag on the counter to dig through it one-handed, her other arm still holding Anzu on her hip. Having never so much as _seen_ money, she had brought with her a few articles of jewelry to barter, and now produced the first thing her fingers brushed: her golden insignia hairpin.

The grey-bearded man's eyes widened at the sight of it. "That's––" He looked up from the hairpin to peer more closely into Yuzhen's face. "I knew you looked familiar! You're one of those phoenix nestlings, aren't you?"

It was funny, being called such a thing – funnily apt, Yuzhen thought – but the man wasn't laughing. With a sinking feeling in her empty stomach, she noticed the portrait of the royal family hung prominently on one wall of the restaurant, herself and her parents and siblings all staring deadpan at the diners, and knew from the sneer curling the man's lips that it hadn't been his first choice of décor.

"What is this, some kind of joke?" he spat. "Or have you come to harass my customers like your soldiers do? Get out of my restaurant!"

"Please, I––"

"Go on, there are plenty of ritzier places where you won't be bothered by _our kind_." Heads were starting to turn, diners to rise from their seats. It was gutsy treating royalty this way, but less of a risk than they knew; Yuzhen couldn't exactly flag down a soldier to have them arrested, even if she'd wanted to. "Go and order one of our tribesmen to his hands and knees so you can use him as a stool."

Yuzhen backed away from the counter, Anzu clinging to her tightly. The grey-bearded man just glared at them, but from the other natives came shoves, jerks at their cloaks. When Yuzhen hastened back through the curtain, she was aware of some of them giving chase, their jeers ringing through the cramped, tunnellike corridors between buildings.

She could fight, but not with Anzu to look out for, and not while keeping a low profile. So she ran.


	7. The Icecap

**Chapter Seven: The Icecap**

Dashing down alleyways with Anzu in her arms, the barks of riled natives at her back, Yuzhen found herself heading deeper into The Magnificent City, toward the curving ice wall that was its northern border. Of course, reaching it left her thwarted anew. Desperate to lose the natives before the chase turned into a confrontation or they attracted the attention of soldiers, she ran along the wall, her mind flailing for her next move.

She was good at thinking on her feet while sparring, but hungry, tired, and with Anzu frozen with terror on her hip, her improvisational skills suffered. She was close to her breaking point when she stumbled across what appeared, at first, to be a flaw in the ice wall. A narrow vertical niche, practically invisible from any angle but the right one.

Inside it was a series of small protrusions, at intervals that made them look as if they could be used as hand– and foot-holds. With no time to think, no time to plan, Yuzhen just acted – transferred Anzu to her back, grabbed the first handhold, and climbed.

Fortunately, even under stress, the strength she'd built in training hadn't left her. She scaled the towering ice wall without faltering, without contemplating the stretching distance they'd have to fall if she lost her grip. Thinking only of her hands before her and her feet beneath her, she soon reached the top of the wall.

There, she let Anzu down and tried to catch her breath, looking down at the red roofs of The Magnificent City. It had never occurred to her that people like the natives in the restaurant would see her and Anzu as their enemies, but now it seemed an unconquerable truth. How could they show their faces down there again? The servant's ring around her neck hadn't won them any points with the grey-bearded man, and no doubt that portrait was plastered all over the city. It'd be a gamble letting anyone get more than a few moments' look at them.

Yuzhen turned and squinted against the wind, whipping bitterly across the icecap. It was all snow and ice up here, but she could just make out a few small caves in the distance. If they could get to one, they could at least take shelter from the wind while she figured out their next move.

She picked Anzu up again and together they walked toward the grey horizon, heads bent against the driving wind. It would have been tough going for anyone, Yuzhen thought, but for people so accustomed to the comfortable climate of the palace, dressed only as warmly as their indoor wardrobes allowed, the trek was particularly formidable. The cold felt almost supernatural, beyond any idea Yuzhen had ever had of what weather could be.

After some time – she didn't know how much – she had to stop. Just to rest, she told herself. Enfolding Anzu in her cloak, she sat down in the snow and held her youngest sister against her, tried to pulse heat into her shivering body.

In this sunless cold, the fire inside was a feeble flicker, but there was enough warmth to succor one of them, if only for a bit. Yuzhen hitched Anzu up, nestling Anzu's head in the crook of her neck. "Is everything still going to be all right?" Anzu whispered, her fingers curling into Yuzhen's cloak.

Yuzhen wrapped her arms tighter around her. "I promised you, didn't I?"

What else was she to say? _Maybe not? Maybe you've come halfway across the world, steadfast as a soldier, never even asking_ why _, only to die, exhausted and half-starved, in ice instead of fire? Maybe Mother was right to tell me not to make promises I can't keep?_

What a miserable final thought. _Mother was right._

It would be better, though, not to think. Better to conserve her energy, to be nothing but kindling, to just burn and burn until she couldn't anymore. As the wind howled, as the snow swirled, Yuzhen burned for Anzu, and let fog roll in behind her eyes.

"Are you sure?"

The next thing Yuzhen was aware of was a woman's voice from somewhere above her. She was aware, too, of lying on her side in the snow, of her firebending having failed her at last – only white wisps of breath issued from her now – but mostly of the voice. Two voices, actually. They faded in and out, half-drowned in the roar of the wind and the laborious thud of Yuzhen's heartbeat in her ears.

"––my mother's ring; she said––"

That was a man's voice. There was the woman's reply, then a brief back-and-forth deliberation, then the man's voice coming in clear again: "They'll freeze to death if we leave them here."

The woman said something, and suddenly heat broke over Yuzhen, accompanied by the sibilant sound of flame. Even as it disappeared it thawed her, roused her. An arm slid around her shoulders and lifted her first to a sitting position, then to her feet. Another pair of arms scooped up Anzu.

Yuzhen lurched across the icecap leaning on the owner of the supporting arm, a white-clad figure that could have been either the man or the woman. Between their hoods, face-masks, and layers of heavy clothing, they were as indistinguishable from one another as the servants in the palace, and they said nothing to her or Anzu. She didn't even know where they were taking them, though she guessed it would be one of the caves they had failed to reach on their own.

But now they were stopping, nowhere near the caves, nowhere near any landmark Yuzhen could identify. The figure holding Anzu set her down and raised its arms in something Yuzhen recognized instantly as a form, albeit somewhat different from the forms she'd learned from Lanfen. With the fluid thrust and sweep of the figure's arms, a section of snow folded in on itself, revealing a staircase cut into the ice beneath.

Once they were belowground, the waterbender sealed the entrance, and a small flame crackled to life in the other figure's palm. Its light revealed a tunnel of ice, long and wide enough for the four of them to walk through it upright. As they did so, in silence still – already Yuzhen had a thousand questions, but she dared not ask them – Yuzhen lost count of the bends in the tunnel, and any sense of the distance between its entrance and...wherever they were going.

At length, they stopped at an apparent ingress, where another quick motion of the waterbender's hands threw the ice apart like double doors. Beyond it, Yuzhen saw with astonishment, lay a large chamber hollowed out of the icecap. Lanterns lent a golden glow to the white walls; animal pelts covered sculpted-ice furnishings.

The firebender led Yuzhen and Anzu to a slab of ice cushioned by furs. Despite herself, Yuzhen collapsed as if drugged. Out of the elements and any immediate danger, her physical depletion overcame her, dragging her into sleep before she could even see the faces of her rescuers.


	8. The Path of Destiny

**Chapter Eight: The Path of Destiny**

Yuzhen woke disoriented, even more so than she'd been waking in the hold on the ship. It took her several long moments to register and remember the ice chamber – an environment as far removed from the palace as any she could have imagined. But she was here. Their rescue hadn't been a dream. Anzu lay sleeping on the pelts next to her.

Across the room, tending a pot over a fire-pit in the floor, she saw a man and a woman. The man sported a mop of brown hair and a short scruffy beard, the woman a sheet of ink-colored hair, and both were older than she and dressed warmly. Yuzhen's stomach cried out in longing at the smell of the food they were cooking, but her throat contracted at the thought of finally having to speak to them. What on earth was she to say to these strangers who'd delivered her from certain death?

The man spooned some of the pot's contents into a small clay bowl and brought it over to her. Seeing his face up close, Yuzhen caught her breath sharply, her eyelids fluttering in rapid-fire blinks as if to clear some obstruction of her vision. He wasn't a stranger at all.

In her amazement, words tumbled heedlessly from her mouth. "You're supposed to be dead."

"I'm supposed to be a lot of things I'm not," Zuko seemed to reply without thinking, then pulled up short, his brow creasing. "Wait. You know who I am?"

"Of course I know who you are. You're an example."

Yuzhen didn't doubt that Mother and Father had expunged any number of undesirables from the version of history Liling taught, but Zuko wasn't one of them. All of the royal children had grown up haunted by their textbooks' portrait of their elder brother, the disgraced, the dishonored, the disfigured. The traitor prince who had turned against his family and his country and paid for it with his life. His story was the perfect cautionary tale.

Zuko's mouth twisted downward in chagrin. He said nothing, though, returning to the fire-pit while Yuzhen attacked her meal – a meat-and-vegetable stew, what Mother would have called _peasants' food_ , but in that moment the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted.

"Feels like being dead sometimes, living down here," the woman by the fire-pit said. "We're more than six feet under." She spoke dryly, but gently. Yuzhen had already begun to learn that a fugitive's lot was too harsh as it was to go about brandishing bitterness at every opportunity. "I'm Mai. I'd say it's nice to meet you, but nothing much is nice anymore."

Yuzhen nodded slowly. "You're not the waterbender from before," she said, realizing that the woman's voice she'd heard on the icecap hadn't been Mai's.

"Katara's in her room." Zuko inclined his head toward two recesses at one end of the chamber, the entrance to each of which was covered by a hanging curtain. "She'll come out...eventually."

"So is it just the three of you?" Yuzhen asked as her surprise gave way to excitement. "Are you the resistance? How long have you been here? Did you make that ladder in the ice wall? What does the amber ring––"

"Whoa, whoa," Mai interrupted. "We're the ones risking our lives to save yours, so we get to ask the questions first."

"One question in particular," Zuko said. "Why are you here?"

Yuzhen glanced down at Anzu, asleep beside her. She hadn't told her the truth behind their flight, and she didn't know how she ever could – how she could look into her youngest sister's honey-colored eyes and say _our parents wanted you dead_ – but to speak it aloud now seemed safe enough. Anzu didn't look close to waking.

"I had to get Anzu out of the palace," Yuzhen said quietly. "Mother and Father were going to kill her."

"Why?" Mai said. "She spill tea on the carpet?"

Grateful though she was for company that didn't have to be convinced of Mother and Father's ruthlessness, Yuzhen couldn't summon so much as a snort. "She's not a firebender. At least we don't think so."

"Ah. Well, that's a capital offense if I've ever heard one." Mai rolled her eyes. "Great spirits forbid anyone upset Azula's vision of a troop of perfect little soldiers doing perfect fire-fists in perfect unison."

Yuzhen smoothed her fingertips gingerly over Anzu's cheek. "I know it's a suicide mission. I know they'll come looking for us, and odds are they'll find us. But I practically raised Anzu; I'm the closest thing she knows to what a mother _should_ be. I couldn't just bow my head and hold my tongue while Mother fed her to the lava."

"So you came looking for the resistance," Zuko said.

"It was all I could think to do."

Having scraped her bowl clean, Yuzhen got up and went to serve herself more stew. Instead of taking it back to the ice slab where Anzu slept, she sat cross-legged around the fire-pit with Zuko and Mai, soaking up the fire's warmth. The cold was more tolerable underground, insulated from the wind and snow, than above, but they were still surrounded by ice.

"I wish there were more to find," Zuko said grimly. "We're barely a resistance anymore. We get messages from other cells sometimes, but they're all just a few strong, like us, and no better off. Mostly what we do is steal food and supplies from the city and lay low here – try to hang on to our lives, whatever they're worth."

Sitting close to Zuko, Yuzhen could see how closely he resembled Mother and Father, the high cheekbones and laurel leaf-shaped eyes they shared. She could see, too, the toll this hopeless, hardscrabble existence had taken on him, how it had worn his face into the face of a man older than she knew he was. Still, the mere fact of that existence gave her an unfamiliar feeling: hope, small but bright, like a firefly.

Yuzhen had never seen a firefly, only imagined them. Until now, the same had been true of hope.

All her life, even as she'd distrusted Mother and Father, she'd had no choice but to believe most everything they told her. Their eyes were the only ones she had through which to see the world. But if the dead lived, the impossible was possible. The Great Empire wasn't invincible. There was a chance, perhaps not of winning, but of living to fight another day.

"You saved our lives," Yuzhen said, her voice soft, her eyes on the flames licking the bottom of the pot. "That makes yours worth everything, to us." She looked up again. "Thank you for that, by the way. I mean, it doesn't sound like enough, but–-thank you."

"Don't thank us," Zuko said gruffly. "Thank my mother. If it weren't for that ring around your neck you'd be a frozen corpse right now."

Yuzhen touched the ring, uncomprehending. "I got this from a servant in the palace."

Zuko nodded. "She sought out the resistance after Sozin's Comet, and fought with us for awhile. Then after our last stand against The Great Empire, when we went into hiding and my father and sister declared us dead, she left to infiltrate the palace. She'd heard about the dress code Azula imposed on the servants, and she knew she could use it to slip in unrecognized. She said––"

Zuko stopped and shook his head as though trying to jar loose a troublesome thought. "We agreed on that ring as our signal. If she was ever able to get a message to me, she would send it along, so I would know it wasn't a trap."

Yuzhen's fingers found the ring again, this time with new reverence. The path of fortuitous circumstances that had led her and Anzu here seemed ever-lengthening. Was this, she wondered, what people meant when they spoke of destiny?


	9. Consequences

**Chapter Nine: Consequences**

If there was little sense of day or night on the icecap, there was even less beneath it. Yuzhen slept when Zuko and Mai extinguished the lanterns in the main chamber and retired into one of the curtained-off recesses, and woke at what she could only assume was the same time she'd been waking for eighteen years. She lit the lanterns, found the tea things, and was trying to puzzle out the preparation of a pot when Mai emerged from behind her curtain.

"Early bird, huh?"

"Force of habit." Yuzhen smiled sheepishly as Mai took the teakettle from her. She felt like a fool, unable to make a simple pot of tea, but it was hardly something Liling had included in her lessons. "Back home we rose at dawn every day. Mother has no patience for layabouts."

"Light a fire in the pit for me, will you?" As Yuzhen did so, Mai opened a straw basket, produced a good-sized chunk of ice, and put it in the teakettle. "Now melt that down. We can't store water down here without it freezing," she added by way of explanation, "so we improvise."

Focusing all the heat in her body through her hands, Yuzhen turned the ice into water and handed the teakettle to Mai, who set it over the pit to boil. The smoke from the fire wafted up into the mouth of a small pipe in the ceiling, which Yuzhen guessed was the ice chamber's only means of ventilation.

"I always imagined life in the phoenix nest couldn't be much fun," Mai said.

"It's very...orderly."

"You mean _boring._ " From another straw basket, Mai took a small tin of tea leaves. "Life down here is boring too, but it's better than prison."

The kettle sang and Mai removed it from the fire. "Um––is there anyplace Anzu and I can take a bath?" Yuzhen asked, feeling foolish again – the pampered princess, accustomed to perfumed soaps and golden dragon fountains – but chafing under the grime of her travels.

"You can use the tub over there, if you don't mind becoming an ice sculpture when you get out." Mai nodded to a wooden tub draped with a sheet of canvas, sitting against one wall of the chamber. "And you'll have to get Katara to bend some water out of the walls. We don't have nearly enough ice cut to fill it."

Yuzhen shot a nervous glance at the curtains. "I don't want to wake her."

"Don't worry. She doesn't sleep much."

Yuzhen had yet to properly meet the waterbender who had helped rescue her and Anzu on the icecap, and she hesitated to do so by asking her to draw her a bath. Zuko and Mai spoke of Katara only obliquely, saying nothing of who exactly she was or what had kept her in her room since yesterday – anger? Fear? Contempt? It hardly seemed plausible that she was too busy to come out and make Yuzhen and Anzu's acquaintance, or that she had forgotten they were there.

But Yuzhen was determined not to make a fool of herself thrice in one morning, and besides, Katara couldn't possibly be more intimidating than Mother and Father. Yuzhen went to her entryway and rapped on the ice wall beside the curtain. "May I come in?"

No answer was forthcoming, but Yuzhen heard faint sounds of movement in the room. A few moments later, a severe-faced woman with a jungle of brown hair pushed back the curtain. She regarded Yuzhen impassively.

"Good morning," Yuzhen said with a dip of her head. "I–-well, I thought we would take a bath, my sister and I, and Mai said you might be so kind as to––"

"Uncover the tub."

Yuzhen blinked, processed the command, and hurried over to pull the canvas from the top of the tub. A gesture of Katara's hand coaxed a shimmering globe of water from the ice wall, then dropped it into the tub, filling it three-quarters to the rim.

"Thank you," Yuzhen said meekly. Katara accepted a cup of tea from Mai and disappeared into her room, the swish of the curtain the only sound accompanying her exit.

Yuzhen heated the water and woke Anzu, and together they climbed into the tub. There were no floral shampoos or jade combs, only a chunk of soap Mai had lent them, but it was wonderful to be warm, and to slough off the layers of dirt they had collected throughout their journey like souvenirs. Having never before gone a day without bathing - nor done much, save training, to really need a bath - Yuzhen could confidently say she was the dirtiest she'd ever been.

It was in the tub that Anzu finally asked why they had run away. Yuzhen answered her, not lying, but omitting the ugliest part of the truth. "We weren't safe back home _,_ "she said, and Anzu seemed to accept that.

"Are we going to live here now?" she said then. "With these people?"

That was a question Yuzhen could answer honestly, if not helpfully. "I don't know."

When they had finished with their bath and dried and dressed as quickly as they could, they sat around the fire-pit with Zuko and Mai, having a breakfast of rice and tea. Zuko told them a bit about the resistance, or what was left of it. A second cell, comprised of the remaining Kyoshi Warriors and the Avatar's sky bison, was sheltered by the nuns in an old Earth Kingdom abbey; a third hid out in the cave systems of the Kolau Mountains. The rest had either dissolved or lost contact with their sister cells.

"Enough about us." Mai tipped the last few drops of tea in the pot into her cup. "You know, you nestlings are a pretty enigmatic bunch. The royal family portrait is in heavier circulation than our wanted posters used to be, but otherwise the mysteries of the phoenix nest are just that. You weren't worried about your other siblings?"

Yuzhen sighed. "I've worried about our brother almost every moment since we left." She struggled to swallow the lump of guilt and grief that rose in her throat when she thought of Zhian. "As for our other sister, the only danger she's in is of drowning under a fountain in the bath, what with her nose so high in the air. And Mother's pregnant––"

"Again?" Mai interrupted, wrinkling her nose. "You'd think they were trying to repopulate the earth singlehandedly."

"––-but that doesn't count."

Zuko frowned. "Why not?"

Yuzhen looked down at Anzu, who sat in her lap. There was a brief, tight silence in which she groped inwardly for a way out of the corner she'd talked herself into. "Anzu," Mai said before it could stretch on too long, "I think there are some jasmine tea leaves in my room somewhere. Would you go and find them for me?"

Anzu agreed readily, rising and scooting behind Mai's curtain. When she was gone, Mai raised an eyebrow at Yuzhen. "You didn't have to do that," Yuzhen said. "It's not a big deal. It's just...they don't all turn out."

"Turn out?"

"I've learned not to count my pig-chickens before they hatch. Mother's been pregnant more times than I have siblings." Yuzhen stared down at the folds of fabric in her lap, seeing in them the low light of the sconces in the corridor outside the birthing room. "Three times, at least. Three babies stillborn. The last time, I overheard Father raging at Mother – saying her failure disgusted him."

Yuzhen left out what had happened after Father had gone: how she'd slipped in to find Mother lying unattended in the birthing bed, looking blankly at the ceiling, her face shining with sweat. _Perhaps the spirits have cursed me,_ she murmured, and seemed about to continue, to say what it was she thought they had cursed her for, but thought better of it. Taking pity on her, Yuzhen wet a cloth in the basin by the bed and wiped the sweat from her face.

Instead of sneering at her – instead of saying _who are you, my handmaid?_ or _oh yes, that makes it_ all _better –_ Mother had sighed _thank you,_ and closed her eyes. She had never spoken to Yuzhen more tenderly, before or since.

Mai's laugh was like a shard of glass, choked up and spat bloody onto the chamber floor. "Almighty rulers of the world, and they're still struggling with the laws of nature. Figures."

Yuzhen's brow furrowed. "What do you mean, 'the laws of nature'?"

"Ah––" Mai paused, sharing an uneasy look with Zuko. "I _mean_ your particularly gnarled family tree. You know Azula is Ozai's daughter, don't you?"

Yuzhen nodded, confusion tugging her features further into a frown. "Yes."

"Well, I guess you can't be expected to know it, but most people – people who aren't completely nuts – don't have relations with their relations, if you catch my drift. It's unnatural. When two people too close in a bloodline have children, there are often...consequences."

"Oh," Yuzhen said, thick-tongued.

It was perhaps the most anticlimactic and yet unsettling answer possible to the question that had troubled her for years. There was no mystery, no spirit's curse. Just Mother and Father's familiar dark proclivities, their poison spreading in tendrils like purple pipesmoke from Mother's lips.

"I suppose I never really saw Mother as being Father's daughter still," Yuzhen said. "I knew she was, once, but it would be strange to think of her as…"

"Your sister," Zuko finished.

Yuzhen's skin crawled as she grasped in full, for the first time, the implications of what Mai had called her 'gnarled family tree.' She pictured Mother even younger than she, being summoned to the bed of the man who had raised her. Father's mere presence made Yuzhen stiff with fear; how could anyone in her position _desire_ him?

Then she thought of Lily. But as in a losing match, the blows came quickly, one after the next; no sooner had that first horrible moment of clarity dawned than a second overshadowed it. "When you say 'consequences'," she said, "do you mean just stillbirths? Or––"

"I found them!" Anzu scampered out into the main chamber carrying a tin with a jasmine flower painted on it, utterly ignorant of the conversation she had interrupted. Yuzhen could only bite back her question and watch, smiling numbly, while Anzu helped Mai brew a fresh pot of tea.


	10. Dragon's Eyes

**Chapter Ten: Dragon's Eyes**

Yuzhen and Anzu had spent three days and nights in the ice chamber, getting to know Zuko and Mai, taking their meals with Zuko and Mai, passing the time playing cards and Pai Sho with Zuko and Mai, when Yuzhen finally plucked up her nerve and knocked on the ice wall outside Katara's room. This time she didn't announce herself or wait for an answer. She just pulled back the curtain and went inside.

Katara sat on a fur-draped ice slab, apparently her bed, mending a tear in her raiding parka. Her room, like the one Zuko and Mai shared, was sparely-furnished, only the bed and a few shelves and straw baskets for her things. A lantern cast a halo of light around the bed, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

Katara glanced up from her mending just long enough to register Yuzhen's presence. "What do you want?" she said icily.

So much for pleasantries. "I'd like to know why you've been avoiding Anzu and I all this time. Have we done something to upset you?"

Katara snorted. "You _are_ royalty, aren't you? Everything is about you."

"So this is what you always do? For all the years you've lived down here with Zuko and Mai, you've spent all day every day holed up in this room, coming out only to eat and raid the city?"

Katara's needle stopped moving. For a few moments, she was silent, staring at the mending in her lap. She would have been pretty, Yuzhen thought, with her intense eyes and skin the color of milk tea, if she weren't so haggard. Perhaps she _had_ been pretty, once.

"When Sozin's Comet came," she said, her voice sounding hollow, almost disembodied, "we thought we knew what we had to do. Aang was supposed to take down Ozai, my brother and our friends went to attack his airships, and Zuko and I were going to reclaim the Fire Nation. But when we arrived, there was no one there to reclaim it from.

"We realized our mistake too late. By the time we reached the Earth Kingdom, the fleet had moved on, the Wulong Forest had burned to the ground, and the people I cared for most in the world were dead. There was nothing left but ashes.

"I know you had the purest intentions in coming here. I know you didn't choose your family or your lot in life. I know Zuko and Mai trust you, and it's not that I don't. But the fact remains that every breath you and your beloved little sister breathe is a breath that should have belonged to my brother, or my friends, or Aang. Your existence is our mistake. So forgive me, Princess, for not being eager to get to know you."

Yuzhen felt flattened, all the breath crushed out of her lungs. It took what seemed like a long time for her to begin breathing again, and even longer for her to speak. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

Yuzhen approached the bed and sat gingerly on the pelt a few feet from Katara. "I know I can't possibly understand what it's been like for you," she said, daring not look at Katara as she spoke, "but I do know how it feels to be unable to save someone you love."

"Oh?" Katara said tonelessly.

"I was raised by a nursemaid called Song. She was the kindest person I've ever known, and more a mother to me than my mother was or cared to be. But when I was six, she vanished. One morning I woke and couldn't find her anywhere. Mother told me she had tired of me, and gone home to her village.

"It didn't make any sense, but what could I do? Time passed. I stopped weeping for Song, though I never stopped missing her. When I was ten, my brother Zuwei was born, and since the servants who attended to him were forbidden to bond with him, I did. He was a sweet-natured baby – always happy to see me.

"But he wasn't like I remembered Zhian being as a baby. He didn't sit up or roll over until he was a year old. He didn't seem to know his name. Mother and Father suspected he was slow-witted. I think I know why now, but...it doesn't really matter.

"One night, I woke to the sound of footfalls in the corridor."

 _Something drew Yuzhen out of her bed, though she could easily have slid back into sleep. Something guided her feet into her slippers, out of her bedroom and down the corridor. Something dark. A sense of foreboding._

 _She pursued whoever had passed her bedroom just closely enough not to lose them, too far to tell who it was. She hesitated a moment before following them through the main doors in the entrance hall, but only a moment._

 _She saw it happen. As she pulled open one of the heavy, ornately-molded palace doors, as she began to descend the half-moon steps, she saw Mother standing at the edge of the stone terrace, arms extended over the lava pit. She saw what Mother was holding: a blanketed bundle about the size of a sugar sack, from which peeked her baby brother's sleeping face._

 _And then he was gone. That was how Yuzhen knew it wasn't a bad dream. In her nightmares, things always happened in slow motion, but Mother dropped Zuwei quickly._

" _Zuwei!" Yuzhen's scream didn't seem to startle Mother. She just stood there, straight-backed, gazing down into the pit, as Yuzhen tore across the terrace and fell to her knees at its edge, nearly tumbling over herself. When she looked up, her vision misty with tears, she saw the lava reflected in Mother's eyes._

" _Mother," she whispered, but said no more. What more was there to say?_

" _He would have brought shame on the royal family," Mother said. "Those who are not fit to be Princes and Princesses of the Great Empire shall not be allowed the privilege."_

" _So you had to_ kill him _?"_

" _What are you talking about?" As Yuzhen climbed unsteadily to her feet, Mother turned to face her, her expression like a gust of cold wind amid the heat that rose from the lava. "Zuwei fell ill and died during the night. There was no helping it."_

 _Yuzhen had always known Mother to be distant, calculating, even cruel when it suited her, but it wasn't until that moment – not when she took Zuwei's life, but when she looked Yuzhen in the eyes and pretended she hadn't – that she saw her as a monster. "That's what you're going to tell Lily and Zhian, isn't it?" she said. "What you would have told me, if I hadn't seen you." Suddenly seized by righteous anger, Yuzhen shoved her face up into Mother's. "What else have you lied to me about?"_

 _Mother sniffed. "Don't embarrass yourself, Yuzhen."_

 _Breathing hard, tasting her tears, Yuzhen watched Mother stroll back across the terrace toward the palace doors. The dark something from before returned, twisting her thoughts into a shape she didn't recognize at first. "Did you lie to me about Song?"_

 _Mother said nothing, kept walking._

" _Did you do something bad to her? Hurt her?" Yuzhen felt as if she were being strangled by invisible hands. "Did you kill her, too?"_

 _Only then did Mother stop, and look back over her shoulder, and her eyes were wild. They looked like Yuzhen thought a dragon's eyes would look, had there been any dragons left in the world. "I caught that peasant tramp trying to lure Father into her bed. She thought she could outwit me, thought she could take what's mine. Death is the only fitting punishment for such treachery."_

"I yelled at her back as she went inside – told her she was mad, Song would never have done such a thing, she would never have _wanted_ Father." The warmth of tears on her cheeks surprised Yuzhen. "But what difference could I have hoped to make?"

Yuzhen could feel Katara watching her, passing no detectable judgment. When enough time had gone by that Yuzhen thought perhaps she had worn out her welcom, insomuch as it had ever existed, Katara spoke.

"My mother was killed when I was very young. For years I grieved her loss, and raged against the injustice of her murder. But I was naïve. I don't grieve or rage now. Now, I feel nothing." Yuzhen turned her head to meet Katara's eyes, and in them saw something like what she'd seen in Mother's eyes that night on the terrace – something mythic, something feral. There was a dragon in Katara too. "You should have learned to do the same. You'd have lived longer."

Yuzhen swallowed. "What?"

"Ozai and Azula will find you, and they'll kill us all. Zuko and Mai are letting you live in your fairy-tale world for the moment, but they know it as well as I do. Not that I resent you for it. I'm not afraid of dying." Katara smiled grimly. "I've been dead for a long time now."


	11. Lily's News

**Chapter Eleven: Lily's News**

Lily tapped lightly on one of Mother and Father's bedroom doors. "Yes?" Father said, sounding displeased at being bothered in his private quarters on the first night of his and Mother's return home.

"It's me, Father. Lily."

"Ah, Lily." Father's tone changed, became welcoming, warm. "Come in."

Inside, Lily saw Mother in bed in her dressing gown, sitting up against the headboard, her pipe between her lips. A pair of servants were attending to Father, undressing and grooming him for bed, but when Lily entered he dismissed them.

Lily greeted and bowed her head to each of her parents. "I'm sorry to disturb you," she said, "but I have some information I think you'll want to hear as soon as possible."

"Do you, now?" Mother regarded her with hooded eyes. _Don't you feel a bit foolish, trying to intimidate me when you're the size of a hippo-cow and spewing that vile purple smoke?_ Lily wanted to say, but merely nodded, maintaining the gravitas appropriate for the news she was about to deliver.

"Anzu and Yuzhen have run away." Both Mother's and Father's eyes widened, and Mother nearly choked on her pipe. "And I think I know where they've gone. A few days before your departure, I noticed Yuzhen sneaking around the library, and once she left I saw the maps she'd been looking at. I believe they went to The Magnificent City, perhaps in hopes of finding insurgents there."

Father stared at some undefined point across the room, a stitch in his brow, as if his daughters' flight were a difficult mathematics problem he had to figure out. Mother was incandescent with fury. "You knew about this _before we left_ ," she hissed, "and didn't _tell us_?"

Lily lifted her chin and looked at Mother coolly. "I thought that if we let them go, we might learn something we wouldn't have otherwise. Why send spies to ferret out rebels when my sisters are so willing to do it for us?"

"Indeed," Father said slowly. "We may turn this situation to our advantage yet. But we mustn't wait too long." His focus sharpened as he turned to Mother, his eyes hard and glittering. "We leave for The Magnificent City at dawn."

Lily drew a step closer to Father, letting her arm sway so that her hand brushed his sleeve, appreciating the whiteness of her fingers against the redness of his robe. In the bed, Mother stiffened, and Lily smirked. She wasn't sure if Mother knew Father had been visiting her bedroom at night, but she could tell she _suspected_ , and the suspicion was enough to madden her.

"Perhaps it would be best for Mother to remain here," Lily purred, "given the...delicacy of her condition. I could accompany you, Father, if you wish."

"No!" Mother snapped, a note of panic in her voice. She checked herself, and with more composure, added, "I assure you, there is no condition so delicate that it would prevent me from personally crushing those ungrateful little insects."

"Very well," Father said. "I appreciate your initiative, Lily, but it is unnecessary." Father clasped Lily's shoulder and favored her with a smile, sweet as the first bite into the flesh of a ripe piece of fruit. "You've already done a great service to your empire and your parents."

"Thank you, Father."

As she left, Lily exchanged a slit-eyed glance with Mother. _If think your little victory worries me,_ she wanted to say, _think again._ _I'm not the one who birthed a worthless wet match and a stupid, soft-hearted traitor. But I_ will _be the one boarding the royal airship with Father, if not tomorrow then someday soon. Sooner even than you fear._


	12. The Eye of the Storm

**Chapter Twelve: The Eye of the Storm**

After five days living in the ice chamber with the resistance, Yuzhen had acquired a skill set entirely different from the one she'd honed over eighteen years in the palace. She learned to make tea and rice; clean and debone fish and arctic hen; wash and mend clothing; make ink with soot and water; build a cooking fire; use oil to fill lanterns and make soap; cure headaches with feverfew and sleeplessness with valerian. Perhaps most importantly – and paradoxically – she learned to live without fear.

She was freer than she'd ever been, out from under Mother and Father's thumb, in the company of people who didn't constantly test and judge her. But if there were ever a time to be afraid, this was it.

On the sixth day of their stay, when Yuzhen and Anzu were helping Mai with the laundry, Zuko and Katara returned from a raid with harrowed eyes above their face-masks. As soon as Zuko had shed his outermost layer of clothing, he motioned to Yuzhen, somewhat frantically, to join him in his room.

"They're here," he said as soon as the curtain swished shut. "In the city. Father and Azula. They're looking for you."

"What?" Yuzhen's voice was a breathless squeak, her body crumpling against the wall as if she'd been punched in the gut. "How did––how did they know we're here?"

"I don't know, but they do. Katara and I overheard some soldiers spreading the word; they'll raze the city if they have to."

Had Lily somehow learned of her plan? Had Zhian gone back on his word? Had her parents gotten to the servant––to Zuko's mother, her grandmother? Each possibility was worse than the last. "Great spirits," she whispered, sliding down the wall to the floor. "What am I going to do?"

"You mean what are _we_ going to do." Zuko sat beside Yuzhen and turned his head to lock eyes with her. Looking at him, she saw a reflection of her own dismay, but also fortitude, irrepressible and incorruptible. It seemed less a conscious choice and more a feature of his face, as much as the slope of his nose or the shape of his jaw; the fight in him was fundamental.

"Look," he said, "if there's anything life as a rebel has taught me, it's that when you find someone who's on your side, you don't just give them up."

Yuzhen felt a sudden desire to embrace him. "You know, I'm really glad I met you, Zuko." She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips into her eyelids. "But I'm the one who started this. I have to be the one to finish it."

"You didn't start this. _They_ started this, our _great-grandfather_ started th––what do you mean, finish it?"

With each passing moment, she moved closer to the eye of the storm in her head, the quiet center of the fretting and fear. The endgame she'd anticipated all along. "I have to turn myself over to Mother and Father. I'll leave Anzu here, tell them she died on the icecap, or during the journey, or something––that way no one else has to get hurt."

"No." Zuko's voice was taut. "We'll find another way."

"There _is_ no other way. You told me yourself; they'll raze the city if they have to. If worst comes to worst, the North Pole will be destroyed, we'll be found, and me, Anzu, and all of you will be killed. Even in the best-case scenario thousands of innocent people lose what little they have left in the world. Because of me."

"Yuzhen––"

"It's okay. I set out to save Anzu, and I have. I knew what it might cost me." Yuzhen breathed in deeply, blinked the mist from her eyes, and stood. "This is my choice to make."

A short time later, Zuko, Mai and Katara conferred behind one of the curtains while Yuzhen spoke to Anzu in the main chamber, kneeling in front of her confused youngest sister. She had never been able to bring herself to tell Anzu the whole truth, and now, she thought, was hardly the time to start.

"I have to leave for awhile," she said, taking Anzu's hands and squeezing them.

"When will you come back?"

"I don't know." Yuzhen tucked a lock of Anzu's hair behind her ear. "But you like it here, don't you? You like Zuko and Mai."

Anzu's eyes welled with tears, her jaw trembling. "I like _you_."

"Hey, hey," Yuzhen soothed, pulling Anzu into her arms. The back of her throat burned at the tightness of her youngest sister's answering hug, the brittleness of her small body. Holding her close, she felt that body's eager rhythms – the thump of Anzu's heart, the quiver of her breath – and knew that if there was anything in the world more worth dying for, she would never find out what it was.

"You've done so well," she murmured into Anzu's hair. "Remember what I promised you?"

Anzu's chin bumped Yuzhen's shoulder as she nodded, sniffling. "Everything's going to be all right."

Yuzhen gave Anzu their grandmother's ring. They had never really had special possessions, growing up in the palace where finery was commonplace and gift-giving disdained, so it was the best keepsake Yuzhen could leave her with. As she had wished to earlier, she embraced Zuko, and Mai too. It was brief and awkward, but they conveyed to each other in the meeting of their bodies the inestimable value of the intersection of their lives.

Dressed in the robe and cloak she had worn on their journey, her hair in a topknot adorned by her insignia hairpin, Yuzhen left the chamber with Katara. They traveled in silence, first through the tunnel, then across the icecap, the wind at their backs. When they reached the gently-curving border of the icecap, Katara assumed her stance, lifted her arms, and punched out a ladder like the one Yuzhen had climbed six days ago, the ice wall crunching as it shifted.

"You know once you go down there," Katara said, "there's no turning back."

Yuzhen stared down at the city – at the royal airship, identifiable by the golden phoenix at its nose, docked amid the comparably dull warships in the harbor. "I know."

In the city, Yuzhen let herself be apprehended by a small troop of soldiers and frog-marched toward the harbor. She saw that all of the civilians, colonists and natives alike, lined the streets in prostration. Behind them stood firebender soldiers, poised to punish anyone who dared lift their head from the slush.

Word of Yuzhen's capture, it seemed, had crossed the city faster than she could, and at the harbor, Mother and Father were waiting. In their royal regalia, they looked like the golden statues of themselves erected at the center of the city, like the divinities they wanted the world to believe they were – that Yuzhen herself had believed they were, subconsciously. But somehow, they weren't as intimidating as she remembered them.

"Where is Anzu?" Mother barked.

"Anzu is dead," Yuzhen said stonily. "She succumbed to the cold and the stress. I buried her body in the snow."

Mother's eyes narrowed. "Do you think I'm stupid?" She advanced on Yuzhen, her lips drawn back over her teeth in a snarl. Blue fire-daggers snapped to life in her hands. "Do you really expect me to believe––"

"Azula, restrain yourself," Father said, looking and sounding almost bored by the whole business. "What will you do, duel the girl to the death right here on the harbor? In your condition?"

Mother's fire-daggers sputtered out. She glanced sharply at Father, her brow bunched in chagrin, before turning back to Yuzhen. As she did her face crinkled, her eyes squeezing shut, but so briefly as to make Yuzhen think perhaps she had imagined it. "In any case," Mother hissed, " _you_ will not be so lucky as to freeze to death."

The soldiers steered Yuzhen onto the royal airship while Mother and Father gave final orders to the local authorities. In the darkness of her holding cell, Yuzhen heard the ship groan as it rose heavily from the dock, wind buffeting its sides. It reminded her somewhat of leaving the palace in the back of the cart, though of course now she had no warm body nestled against hers, no talisman around her neck. Now, she was well and truly alone.


	13. Interrogation

**Chapter Thirteen: Interrogation**

Upon her arrival at the palace, Yuzhen was taken to a closet between storage rooms on the lowest story, and shackled, hands above her head, to the wall. For awhile, she stood alone in pitch-blackness, with only the sound of her own breathing to prove that she hadn't somehow died unawares and slipped into the void.

Then the door opened on Mother, accompanied by a lantern-bearing servant. She had removed the most ostentatious bits of her regalia, and between two fingers she held her pipe. There was an uncharacteristic wrinkle in her brow, but otherwise she was expectedly cool. A plume of purple smoke swirled from her pursed lips as she examined her eldest daughter.

"You look awfully serene for someone who's been sentenced to death for something she failed to do."

"I'm at peace with my fate," Yuzhen said. "When I die, I'll be with Anzu."

"You're a pretty good liar, Yuzhen. Perhaps we're not so different, you and I." Mother took another drag from the pipe, the exhaled smoke following the curve of her mouth as she smiled. "Unfortunately for you, we're just different enough."

The servant held out a jade tray, and Mother laid her pipe on it with a soft clack. "You should know," she said in a silky caricature of friendliness, "that whatever you've neglected to tell us about your little adventure, I _will_ find out."

The servant unfolded a pocketknife, and, to Yuzhen's alarm, cut a slit down the bodice of her robe and underdress. Mother raised her hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep, almost sensual breath. When she opened her eyes, veins of lightning were crackling along her fingers.

Mother approached Yuzhen and placed the first two fingers of both hands on her ribcage, beside her breasts. In an instant, breathtaking pain snapped through Yuzhen's body, tearing a shout from her throat. Her head pitched backward and knocked against the stone wall.

"Who gave you aid in The Magnificent City?" Mother said, her voice low, each word drawn-out and enunciated.

"No––one," Yuzhen gasped.

Another jolt of electricity made her convulse and cry out. "What happened to Anzu?" Mother said.

"I've––already––told you."

The shocks came at punishingly short intervals, just enough space between them for Yuzhen to gulp a breath. She would never have believed that anything that lasted so little time could be so painful. Her heart galloped, her muscles spasmed, her blood vessels felt on the edge of rupture. She screamed until her voice no longer sounded like hers, or any human's.

But she didn't change her story. It was never even an option.

Yuzhen's knees had buckled so that she hung limp from her shackles, her head lolling. Tears glazed her eyes and snaked down her cheeks. Between that and the dim lanternlight, Mother's face, just a few inches away, was hard to make out – but there was something off about her, something even Yuzhen could discern. The wrinkle in her brow had multiplied. Her face was dewed with sweat.

It was as if she too were in pain, and it was worsening quickly. The space between shocks stretched as she deteriorated, breathing in huffs through her nose, digging her teeth into her lower lip. When she opened her mouth to demand the truth from Yuzhen and a groan escaped instead, the servant took a step toward her.

"Your majesty, perhaps––"

Mother whipped her head around. "Shut up!" she barked, then turned back to Yuzhen, her composure suddenly lost to rage. "I will not be lied to! I will not be made a fool! You will confess your treachery, or so help me I will make you _beg for death!_ "

Her voice broke on the last word, and her hands shrunk from Yuzhen's sides. The servant cracked the door to call for help. "Your majesty, you must let us escort you to the birthing room," she said as two other servants swept into the closet, surrounding and supporting Mother. Yuzhen remembered Mother's brief, inexplicable wince in the The Magnificent City. Of course – it was her labor pains that had been harassing her all this time. "The king will not want his new son or daughter born in such a place as this."

"Don't tell me what my husband wants," Mother snapped. She glared poison-darts at Yuzhen, her chest heaving...but finally, grudgingly, she let the servants usher her away.

Yuzhen's body slackened in her shackles. So her new sibling would enter the world in the twilight of her time in it. Or perhaps they would meet shortly in the hereafter. Did stillborn infants remain infants forever? That would be an underwhelming eternity.

Enfolded in such delirium, Yuzhen lost consciousness. How long she was out, she couldn't measure. She knew only that at some point, there was a hand cradling her cheek, a voice whispering her name. Her eyelids felt leaden, and when she managed to lift them, it took her a moment to process the face in front of her. No, not a face...just a pair of eyes, behind a window of netting. A servant.

But no ordinary servant would address her so familiarly. "Grandmother?"

The woman under the cloak and veil moved as if to embrace Yuzhen, then, considering her condition, thought better of it. "So you found them," she said, her eyes alight with hope.

Yuzhen nodded. "Anzu is with them now."

Grandmother tinkered with Yuzhen's shackles until they released her, and caught her in her arms before she collapsed to the floor. "We must hurry. Azula is still in the birthing room, but she will return soon, and your opportunity will be lost."

"My opportunity…?" Yuzhen blinked, shook her head. "Grandmother, I came back here to protect the rebels. If I run again, Mother and Father will just track me back to them."

"They won't know you've run. I'll tell them you died of your injuries, and I disposed of your body."

Yuzhen fought to stem a swell of hope, sure that it was foolhardy. She had lied to Mother about Anzu, but she'd meant what she said about having made peace with her fate – or resigned herself to it, in any case. She had accomplished more than she'd ever thought possible. There had to be a price. "But where would I go?"

"Zuko and the others will come for you."

"No, they won't. I told them this was my responsibility, I told them I didn't want them hurt––"

"I know my son." Grandmother looked into Yuzhen's eyes, tenderness and conviction alloyed in the golden steel of her gaze. "They will come for you."


	14. Battle on the Terrace

**Chapter Fourteen: Battle on the Terrace**

It was only a short distance between the closet where Mother had interrogated Yuzhen and the exit onto the terrace, but Yuzhen was weak and moved slowly, leaning on Grandmother for support. "Will you come with us, Grandmother?" she asked.

Grandmother shook her head. "As long as my cover holds, I must stay. It gives me great joy to have helped you and Anzu to a better place, but your siblings are still here, and so is Azula."

Yuzhen was bemused. Zhian she could see, and perhaps the new baby if it survived, but Mother and Lily were the reasons _others_ needed help. What could Grandmother possibly do for them – referee their squabbles over Father's affection?

"I've seen that look before," Grandmother said, a sad smile in her eyes. "When I parted ways with the rebels, I told Zuko that Azula needed me more than he did. He didn't understand."

Yuzhen remembered Zuko's uncomfortable pause partway through his account of his mother's departure. "Azula is a lonely child," Grandmother continued. "She tries to strike fear into others in hopes that it will ease her own. She knows deep down that Ozai does not, _cannot_ love her, and she's terrified of being cast aside. I failed to save her from him and from herself, and I may fail to make any difference for her in the end, but at least in being here I'm paying off a small part of my debt to her – making sure she's not alone, even if she doesn't know it."

It was difficult for Yuzhen to feel sympathy for Mother with her insides fried by her shocks, but listening to Grandmother speak, she gained a new appreciation for the strength it must have taken her just to rise with the dawn bells each day. Was there anyone who had seen this epic horror story from as many angles as she? She had watched it unfold from the Firelord's palace during the Great March of Civilization, from the shadows as an exile, from the rebels' trenches after the comet, and now from behind a servant's veil in the phoenix nest. She had witnessed and borne so much suffering and sorrow, with her own family at the center of it all.

They had reached the exit to the terrace. Yuzhen turned to Grandmother and bowed her head. "Thank you, Grandmother."

Grandmother hugged her, gently so as not to hurt her. Then they went out onto the terrace and huddled against the palace wall, awaiting the aid Grandmother had said would come.

And it did, with impressive timing. A great shadow, presumably the sky bison Zuko had said still lived, slid through the reddish clouds above the palace. From it dropped two ropes, and down those ropes climbed two figures: Zuko and Katara.

Zuko said nothing at first, only let out a breath of relief and embraced Grandmother. "It's all right," she said softly, seeming to know what he had feared. "I'm all right. However they found out where she went, they didn't find out I sent her."

Zuko told them they weren't going back to the ice chamber. He said they had a plan, one the resistance had been holding in reserve until their collective hand was forced. It would be dangerous to enact, and not at all certain to work, but Yuzhen and Anzu's arrival at the North Pole had shown them that the time for lying low was past. Once they had fought against all odds to save the world. Now they would make a last-ditch bid to resurrect it.

"We need to get out of here," Katara said. "The longer we stay, the likelier we'll get caught."

"She's right. There's no time to waste." With a last longing glance at Zuko and Yuzhen, Grandmother hastened back through the doors to the lowest story of the palace. It occurred to Yuzhen that she and Grandmother might never meet again, and she hadn't even seen her face.

But this was hardly a moment to dwell on such thoughts. With Zuko helping her, Yuzhen shuffled across the terrace to the ropes, hoping as she took hold of one that she would make it all the way up.

As if through muffling fabric, or from a long way away, she heard the scraping groan of one of the palace doors opening––and then, all too sharp, all too close, saw twin fire-daggers fly through both ropes, severing them. Blue fire-daggers. For a precious few seconds, Yuzhen didn't move, didn't turn her head, thinking desperately that if she didn't look at Mother, if she didn't acknowledge their narrow arrest, it wouldn't have happened.

"I _knew_ you were protecting someone," Mother hissed as she stalked across the terrace toward them. When Yuzhen did look at her, she was taken aback. Mother wore only a dressing gown. Her hair was disheveled, her makeup running down her face, and with each step, she swayed a little. "But a couple of _zombies!_ "

Mother laughed, a jagged sound. She grabbed Yuzhen by her upper arm and jerked her away from Zuko. Both he and Katara had assumed their combat stances, their elements at the ready. "What, no polite small talk?" Mother said, pulling Yuzhen tight against her. "All these years and you're not even going to ask how I am?"

Yuzhen didn't have the strength to escape Mother's hold, much less fight her off; the fire inside was guttering miserably, such that she didn't think she could have warmed a cup of tea. Zuko and Katara exchanged a taut glance. "Well, I'd say you look well," he muttered, "but I was never the liar in the family."

Mother's fingers dug into Yuzhen's arm. "You come here to kidnap my daughter, and when I catch you you insult me? You were never the smart one in the family, either."

"Your daughter _chose_ us over you."

"Yes, well, parenting isn't always about being popular, Zuzu. But I suppose you wouldn't know that, would you? Unless you're rearing pups with an arctic fo––"

Mother's taunt broke off in a startled grunt as Katara blindsided her with a blast of ice shards, knocking her off balance and Yuzhen to the terrace. Crumpled on the stone, she could only watch as Mother and the rebels clashed, flinging fire and water with grimacing ferocity. It was the first real fight she had ever seen, and far messier, she thought, than a sparring match.

Of course, Zuko and Katara would lose. Mother wouldn't be able to take them both down like this, armorless and just-risen from the birthing bed, nor would her pride permit her to summon the royal guard. But Father would come. Any moment now, Father would come, and it would all be over.

Although he wasn't coming as quickly as Yuzhen had thought. Zuko was drawing Mother's fire, managing to occupy if not overpower her, and Katara was hauling Yuzhen to her feet, hustling her over to the dangling ends of the ropes. She whisked water from one of her skins and whipped it around them.

"Leaving so soon?" Zuko could hold Mother off, but he couldn't make her shut her mouth. "Funny, I didn't have you pegged for one to run away. Not with so much to avenge."

With Katara's arm hooked around Yuzhen's waist, they shot upward in a whirl of water, just high enough to grab hold of a rope. "I wouldn't waste my revenge on you," Katara spat as the water splashed to the terrace.

Mother's pupils shrunk. She lunged at them only to be blocked by Zuko, threatened lightning only to have her arm kicked out of its arc. "You dismiss me so easily, rebel rat," Mother rasped. "Almost as easily as I dispatched your little boyfriend."

She was lying. It was Father who had slain the Avatar; everyone knew it. Still, Yuzhen saw the muscles in Katara's neck tense.

"But I understand." There was something rash, even frantic, about the way Mother slung her jeers. Her voice carried an undercurrent of breathy, wobbling laughter. "The airbenders were a peaceful bunch, weren't they? He wouldn't have _wanted_ you to take revenge on his killer, even when she's standing _right in front of you_."

Katara's shoulders were quivering as under a great weight. Zuko's eyes widened. "Katara, don't––!"

Mother was baiting her and Katara knew it, Yuzhen could tell. But Katara didn't care. In a surge of water and fury she crashed down upon Mother, snatching her up in liquid tentacles, thrashing her about. Mother broke free and roared fire at her. They moved like ice-skaters, spinning around one another, attacking in great sweeping flourishes.

Or perhaps less like ice-skaters, Yuzhen thought, than dragons, horned and dagger-backed, serpentine bodies barreling through the air. A duel between dragons.

Yuzhen could hear Zuko shouting at her to go, to climb to safety on the bison, but she couldn't. Her arms could barely keep her weight aloft. Soon she was losing her grip on the rope, plummeting to the terrace, landing on her back with a thud. Her hairpin slipped out of her topknot and clattered onto the stone.

She could only lie there, breathing shallowly, while the scene unspooled before her: Mother launching into a low wheeling kick, fire rolling out from her bare foot. Zuko and Katara dodging. Mother darting past them and throwing herself onto Yuzhen, crouching over her like a hungry animal over a carcass.

"Why don't we make a deal?" Mother said to the rebels. "Leave Yuzhen, and you may go." She grinned. "Of course, I'll have to send the royal guard after you, but if I were you, I'd rather take my chances with them than with Father. And in the spirit of sportsmanship, I'll even give you a thirty-second head start."

Zuko and Katara stared at her, panting, sweating, frozen. What could they do? If they so much as made a move toward Mother, she could incinerate Yuzhen where she lay. If they took her at her word, she'd just as likely pump them full of lightning as they fled as keep it.

Even in nothing but a dressing gown, mere hours after giving birth, and with Father mysteriously late to the battle on his own doorstep, Mother had managed to outdo the rebels. Perhaps she hadn't lied about killing the Avatar. Close enough to her to feel the stampede of her heartbeat, the thunder of a thousand mad beasts carrying her royal blood through her veins, Yuzhen believed that this woman – her mother, her elder sister, the Phoenix Queen of the Great Empire – was capable of anything.

But there was one thing she hadn't counted on.

While Mother's attention was on the rebels, Yuzhen gathered her remaining strength, grabbed her hairpin from the terrace, and drove its sharp end deep into Mother's heart.


	15. Death and Rebirth

**Chapter Fifteen: Death and Rebirth**

Phoenix Queen Azula, master of fire and lightning, conqueror of all creation, slayer of the Avatar, struck down with a symbol of her glory by her own child. It seemed like a cruel joke.

Gasping and trembling, Yuzhen yanked the hairpin from Azula's chest. Blood bubbled up in the wound and became a quickly-spreading stain on her dressing gown. There was pain, but it was less a sensation than an impression – a sleepy, surreal impression, as of a dream she couldn't quite remember.

Zuko rushed to pull Yuzhen out from under her, and Azula collapsed onto the terrace. As her vision began to fuzz, she saw a familiar figure emerge from the palace doors, with a second, slighter figure trailing it. Father and Lily. She couldn't make out their expressions, but she didn't need to; she could feel the chill from where she lay.

She knew Father would offer her no aid, and why should he? She had betrayed him. In a moment of recklessness, she had told an unforgivable lie – the truth, once, but not anymore. For years Father and Azula had woven their own truth and arrayed the world in it, and to contradict it was tantamount to treason. A capital crime.

She knew there would be no funeral, no mourners in white, and why should there be? She wouldn't die. This body would bleed out, this soul would pass on, but Phoenix Queen Azula of the Great Empire would live still. There she stood now, on the palace steps beside Father. How perfect they looked together.

Lily, still young and resplendent, her body yet unspoiled by childbearing, her wits yet untested by paranoia, would be reborn from Azula's ashes. She would take Azula's place on her throne and in her bed, and know the sublime triumph of being Father's most prized possession. She would learn that to a king who owns everything, no possession is more than a trinket. And perhaps someday, when she was a grown woman and Father an old man, she would bear him a daughter with a remarkable resemblance to her, and he would say _what a beautiful child; we shall name her for her mother_.

She and Father didn't even stay to watch Azula go. The last things she saw before her eyes failed her were their backs as they turned and processed back into the palace. Then all was darkness, warm, wet darkness, and Azula was afraid, though she wouldn't have admitted it had she someone to admit it to.

She thought she felt her head being pulled into someone's lap, a hand stroking her hair. She thought she heard a voice – her mother's voice, thick with tears. But her mother had been gone for ages. Only in Azula's imagination could Mother be here, could Mother have forgiven her, could she have forgiven Mother. It was only the desperation of a dying mind, an extinguished flame, guttering and going out.


	16. The Drums of War

**Chapter Sixteen: The Drums of War**

Lily watched the rebels flee, noting the direction in which the shadow beyond the clouds flew. She noted, too, that said direction wasn't northward. Would they be so foolish as to rendezvous with their co-conspirators? Would Lily be so lucky?

It had been Lily's idea to bait Yuzhen with the destruction of The Magnificent City, for she knew there was no need to actually go through with it when the threat alone would be enough to flush her sister out. It had been Lily's idea to bring her back to the palace instead of trying to force her to lead them to the rebels, for her capture would lead the rebels to them. It had been Lily's idea to let the rebels run, for to cut them down on the terrace would have been to clip the leaves of a poisonous plant, while to track them to their hideout would be to dig up its roots.

And now it seemed perhaps they would unearth a whole root system. How fortunate, Lily thought, that her elder sister had turned out a traitor. Without Yuzhen, she wouldn't have had this chance to prove herself to Father, nor would they have been able to get rid of Mother so easily.

Lily felt pity for Mother. Once, it was said, she was the clever one; she too had known how to write her enemies' fate in the ink of their own weaknesses. But perhaps to share such a gift was to sacrifice it. As long as Lily had known her, the only fate she had seen Mother write was her own.

In any case, Mother was gone, and the path was cleared for Lily to take what was owed her. All that was left was to eliminate the resistance. The drums of war pounded in her heart as she followed Father through a bolted door on the lowest story of the palace. On the other side was a stairway that cut through the solid stone on which the palace sat. It spiraled downward for what seemed like miles, through and below the lava pit, into the black earth, where the only light was a flame cupped in Father's hand.

He unlocked another door and they stepped into a stone chamber. It was dark, but Lily could hear its size in the echo of their footsteps. Then she heard something else: breathing.

When Father extended his arm to illuminate more of the chamber, Lily gasped. Crouched only ten feet away was an enormous red dragon. It eyes were dull, its hide scarred, and it had a broken horn and fang, but it was a fearsome beast nonetheless. And she saw no muzzle, no chains.

"Why doesn't it attack?" she whispered.

"It knows its master."

Lily thrilled at Father's refusal to be intimidated by nature's most intimidating creation. The Great Empire had conquered nature, as it had conquered everything else. No, better: it had _tamed_ her.

"You have been a fine and faithful servant of your empire," Father said, "but there is one task left to you before you reap its highest reward. Take the dragon as your mount. Follow the rats to their hole and exterminate them. Do this and you shall have all you desire and deserve: the Phoenix Queen's throne, the sacred duty of propagating our bloodline, and the restoration of your rightful name."

Father bowed his head to Lily, and she sighed as if with physical pleasure. "I look forward to your triumphant return, Azula."

 **xxx**

Thus, we come to the end of our story. Well, not the end of the story - I've imagined a great deal more for this universe - but the end of what I actually got out of my imagination and into a Google Doc. As of now I have no concrete plans to write up any sequels, so yeah, we'll call this the end. Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed, and even though this last bit is a cliffhanger, I hope you enjoyed it.


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